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River Raid is a scrolling shooter video game designed and developed by Carol Shaw, and published by Activision in 1982 for the Atari 2600 video game console. Activision later ported the title to the Atari 5200, ColecoVision, and Intellivision game consoles, as well as to the Commodore 64, IBM PCjr, MSX, ZX Spectrum, and Atari 8-bit family home computers.

Viewing from a top-down perspective, the player flies a fighter jet over the River of No Return in a raid behind enemy lines.

The player scores points for shooting enemy tankers (30 pts), helicopters (60 pts), fuel depots (80 pts), jets (100 pts), bridges (500 pts), and (in non-Atari 2600 versions of the game) hot air balloons (60 pts). The jet refuels when it flies over a fuel depot. A bridge marks the end of a game level.

The player's jet crashes if it collides with the riverbank or an enemy craft. In non-Atari 2600 versions of the game, tanks alongside the river also fire at the player's jet. If the player's jet runs out of fuel, it crashes. Assuming fuel can be replenished, and the player evades damage, gameplay is essentially unlimited.

Unlike later scrolling shooters, there is little or no enemy fire in River Raid. Also, the player's jet cannot maneuver up and down the screen, only left and right. It can, however, accelerate and decelerate.

For its time, River Raid provided an inordinate amount of non-random, repeating terrain despite constrictive computer memory limits. The game program does not actually store the sequence of terrain and other objects. Instead, a procedural generation algorithm manifests them by employing a linear feedback shift register with a hard-coded vector. Because this starting value is hard-coded, the algorithm generates the same game world every time the program executes. The enemy crafts' artificial intelligence, however, relies on a random number generation program to make enemy movement less predictable.

River Raid was the first video game to be banned for minors in West Germany by the Federal Department for Writings Harmful to Young Persons (German: Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften).

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